The Secret

Steven was beside himself. Khan had got inside the house at Glenvane and was holding Jenny hostage. Right now it didn’t matter where he had obtained the information. What mattered was that he was holding his daughter and was demanding the memory card in exchange for her life — a card he no longer had. In what now seemed like some hellish irony, he had handed it over to be held under secure conditions and stop it falling into the wrong hands.

There had to be a way round this. He would get in touch with Jean Roberts who had put the card into secure safe-keeping. He would explain what had happened and she would... no, she wouldn’t. She couldn’t! That’s not how the system worked. Having worked out that the card was really the thing Khan was after in his murderous rampage, he and Macmillan had agreed that it be put into the government’s secure system that would keep it safe from any kind of coercion or blackmail attempt being applied to individuals. Nothing he or Macmillan said would make any difference right now. HMG did not pay ransoms, give in to blackmail or make deals with criminals. Steven was in the very position the system was designed to guard against.

He felt as if he were being crucified slowly, one nail at a time. Every idea he came up with seemed to end in a negative. He found himself fighting his way through successive waves of fear and anger which overwhelmed his ability to think clearly. Experience insisted on reminding him that these emotions were his enemy. However difficult it was, he must calm down. He must accept that he couldn’t get his hands on the card: there was just no way to do it, therefore there was no point in considering it further. He had to save Jenny by other means. What other means?

There was no point in waking Macmillan. They would just end up going over the same ground and time was of the essence. Calling up the police in Scotland was also a non-starter and would almost certainly lead to disaster. Explanations would be required, referrals, approvals, permissions and God knows what before anyone actually did anything. There wasn’t time.

He would fly into Edinburgh as instructed. He would follow further instructions to the letter and would hand over a memory card. It couldn’t be the card that Khan wanted so that’s when the big bluff would begin. There was no way of knowing how much time there would be before the deception was discovered but that, he acknowledged with a chill running down his spine, might well be irrelevant. On past performance, there would be no trade. Khan would accept the card and kill both he and Jenny. To give Jenny any chance at all against the bastard he would need help, the kind of help that could only come from one place.

It wouldn’t be the first time Steven had called on the SAS, known universally as the Regiment, for help but never before for personal reasons — Ironically, the last time had been to hitch a lift into Afghanistan to visit a field hospital in the course of an investigation. It wasn’t something he would do lightly but Jenny’s life was at stake and there was nothing on Earth he wouldn’t do to save her.

At this late stage there was no official way he could request army involvement. It would have to be a personal appeal. He would be relying on something front line soldiers knew but tended not to broadcast widely. When the chips were down, it wasn’t Queen and country they fought for and it wasn’t defence of the realm that was uppermost in their minds; they fought for each other. Simple as that.

The rest of it was high-sounding baloney, spouted by politicians as justification for pursuing goals that were becoming increasingly difficult to determine. The Regiment didn’t do bullshit. They didn’t march through towns with fixed bayonets; they didn’t have a royal in a soldier suit as their colonel-in-chief, they didn’t accept the freedom to shit in the street, as one wag put it. They didn’t need the image. They were the real deal.

Front line camaraderie forged a bond that survived long afterwards. It was the only card he had left to play. He called Hereford and presented his credentials as ex-Regiment.

‘Give me an hour,’ was the response when he’d finished making his appeal. ‘No promises but I’ll call you back.’

The minutes passed like proverbial hours with Steven itching to be doing something, not hanging around waiting. He knew he should be planning what to do if the answer from Hereford was no. He knew he should be... telling Tally what had happened. This brought on an extra frisson of anxiety. Tally had been right all along about his job. Normal people did not live like this.

The house phone rang and Steven snatched at it. It was Sue in Scotland.

‘He said not to phone the police,’ she said, her voice betraying the nightmare she was going through.

‘I know, I know,’ soothed Steven, making a supreme effort to keep his voice calm. We have to be strong; we have to keep calm. Tell me what happened.’ He heard Sue swallow in preparation.